Summer’s Wolf

Chapter Five

Summer ran down the long corridor, darkness chasing her steps. She couldn’t get caught. It was too important. Everything would be lost without him. But the truth was she still didn’t care one bit about pack politics. She wanted him back because he was hers.

She tripped, falling face first towards the ceramic floor. Her hands reached out and lessoned the impact. Still she cut her chin. It bled. Summer raised her head. She’d reached her destination.

Summer stood up and wiped her bloody chin with her hands before rubbing most of it off onto her jeans. Her eyes stared through the two-way mirror in front of her.

Her wolf howled inside of her.

Cullen was strapped to a table. Blue liquid poured into his veins through an intravenous tube.

He raised his head an inch and sniffed the air. Summer’s hand flew to her throat. He’d smelled her. She needed to get him out.

He pulled at his restraints, screaming with rage.

A man stepped out of the shadows of the room. She hadn’t seen or smelled him in the room before he’d appeared but she’d know him anywhere at sight. Claudius. He stared through the two-way mirror like he could see her.

“I told you she would come, Cullen. And now that she has we don’t need you anymore.” He raised his left hand and she stared at the gun in it. She ran to the hallway door and pushed on it, desperate to get in the room.

She heard the gun fire.

“Summer, wake up. You’re dreaming.”

Someone shook her gently. Her eyes flung open and she swung with her left hand desperate to make contact, to defend herself from the attack. Cullen ducked to avoid getting struck in the face by her fist.

“Okay, so you don’t wake up well.” Cullen’s voice sounded like gravel and she realized he must have been asleep too.

She sat up. “Sorry, I don’t usually wake up so crazed. I guess I had a bad dream.”

Cullen nodded. “You were screaming. I tried to wake you for two minutes before you roused.” He turned to leave the room.

“Where are you going?” Was that her voice that sounded frantic?

“Back to the living room.”

“Why?”

“To let you sleep.”

“I’m not sleeping after the dream I had.” She didn’t care if she sounded pathetic.

Cullen crossed to the bed and sat down on the edge. “What was the dream?”

Her body drifted towards the indentation he left on the mattress. “I was running down a hallway. It’s not someplace I’ve ever been but in the dream I knew where I was going and it was important that I get there. I arrived at a room and it had one of those two-way mirrors. I looked in and I saw you…”

Summer paused. She wasn’t sure she wanted to tell Cullen the rest of the dream. What did it mean that she’d heard Claudius kill him?

What happened next?

Summer jumped an inch on the bed. She stared at Cullen, her jaw slack. “Did you just say that in my head?”

Cullen nodded but didn’t open his mouth. I did.

“How did you do that?” Summer couldn’t get her head around the fact that Cullen had just spoken to her without using words. He had actually communicated with her in her mind.

You should be able to do it too. You’re pack, so technically everyone in the pack will be eventually able to talk to you this way. But, we’re mates, so it makes it easier for me to do it. You could do it too, if you want to.

Summer shook her head. “I don’t want to.” She pulled the covers up to her neck and leaned against the headboard.

He raised an eyebrow. I thought you were going to start embracing your wolf?

“This telepathy thing is related to my wolf?” Summer’s head whirled. She had told Cullen she would try to work on embracing her wolf in return for his teaching her to kill Claudius. She just hadn’t expected it to start so fast.

Do you know any non-shifters who can speak like this? Anything we do that is magical comes from our wolf-half.

She nodded. Cullen wanted her to try this telepathy. She closed her eyes and tried to send her thoughts to him. When her eyes opened, he stared at her blankly. He’d obviously not received any of the brain waves she’d tried to send his way.

Did you just try?

“Yes.” She threw the cover off of the bed and sat up next to Cullen as she swung her feet down. They dangled like she was a child, not reaching the floor.

I think you’re trying too hard. Your wolf will make sure you can do it. Finish telling me about the dream.

So her wolf had to be involved in the communication. Her four-legged compatriot was surprisingly silent. Why wasn’t her wolf thrilled to be let loose? Summer wondered if she’d ever understand the creature.

It stayed calm, not commenting on what she tried to do. Summer called to it several times and asked her to help her communicate with Cullen. But it didn’t answer.

She clenched her hands into fists. Would nothing ever be easy? She really wanted to show Cullen she could do this. The more she failed the more she was sure he would congratulate himself on having avoided mating her.

Suddenly, the words seemed to flow out of her, smooth and unfiltered. She didn’t feel like she stumbled or had to watch what she said. She could almost sigh with how easy it was.

You were locked in the room, strapped to a table. You smelled me and it seemed to make you angry I was there. Then Claudius entered. They were going to kill you, they’d used you as a trap to lure me. I heard a gun go off. That’s all.

She waited for Cullen’s reaction. He stared into the darkness of the bedroom, his face expressionless. She looked down at her hands. Had she offended him with her dream?

I’m sorry. I’m sure it’s just everything that’s happened. I was bound to dream about death and destruction.

Cullen shook his head. Have you had prophetic dreams before?

Summer jumped to her feet. “Prophetic dreams? That’s not what this was. It was just some stupid thing my imagination concocted.”

“I don’t think so. It runs in your family. Your mother had them when she was young, and your sister gets them regularly. Although she didn’t have one to show her what happened to your parents.”

His eyes stared off into the darkness of the hallway. He was so unreadable to her. She took a deep fortifying breath.

Did she dare reach out and stroke his arm? Little shivers rocked her body.

“Go back to bed,” Cullen urged. “You only slept about two hours. It’s not enough after what you’ve been through.”

She threw off his hand because she was afraid if she didn’t, she’d place it somewhere else on her body. “Let’s get something straight right now. I don’t like to be told what to do.”

Cullen laughed, one long sound but to Summer it was mirthless. “I’ve already gathered that. It doesn’t change what I said. I can’t let you do anything to harm yourself, ever. I just can’t. So, please, Summer, won’t you go back to bed?”

He sounded so reasonable. She felt like stomping her foot.

Listen to him.

Now her wolf decided to speak to her?

He’s our mate. We will take care of him, but right now let him take care of us.

She turned on her heel and walked back to the bed. As she climbed in, she felt a little bit like a disobedient child who finally decided to do what her parents wanted. “So you’re some sort of expert on the subject? Knowing what a person needs to do on the night after their parents die?”

He twisted his t-shirt in his hands. “Not an expert. When my parents were killed it was different. There was no time to rest or grieve.”

Summer’s head swirled. “Your parents are dead?”

“Look, I don’t even know why I brought it up. I’ll leave you alone now.” But Summer noticed that Cullen didn’t budge from where he stood.

She jumped up and let her eyes wander from the top of Cullen’s head to his feet. To her, he was everything a man should be. She swallowed. “Tell me.” She needed to know him as well as he knew her.

Without a word, Cullen closed the space between them and gently pushed her down to sit on the bed. She loved the feel of his body so close to hers. She wanted to reach up, pull his head down, and kiss him. But since Cullen hadn’t deepened the kiss she’d given him earlier, she wasn’t sure he was interested in her that way.

“If I tell you about my parents, will you then at least try to go to sleep?”

She screamed inside. “Stop bartering with me. I’m not a child you have to bribe to go to the dentist.”

He closed his eyes like they pained him. “I haven’t talked about this in two-hundred fifty years.”

“I’m sure once you get started it will just rush over your tongue. It’ll be like learning to walk, you never really forget how to do it.”

Internally, her wolf rolled her eyes. Summer couldn’t see the action but she could feel it. It felt like part of her own eyes moved.

That was dumb. If you can’t think of anything more clever to say than that, shift and I’ll communicate with him.

Even her wolf thought she was pathetic.

“All right.” Cullen sat on the bed next to her and lay down, his head braced on his arm against the headboard. He patted the bed next to him. Summer gladly joined him. Her fingers drummed lightly on her leg, and she tried to keep from shaking.

She deeply inhaled Cullen’s spicy male scent and tried to ignore that her panties got damp. Her wolf prowled around inside, desperate for Cullen’s touch. If she could smell him, he could smell her which meant he knew she’d just gotten wet. Heat rose in her cheeks.

He cleared his throat and reached over to take her hand in his. He gently stroked the top of her hand with his thumb. The simple act sent shivers up and down her spine. Cullen stared straight ahead.

“Things were different when I was a child. We didn’t live as we do now. My father was a fisherman. I didn’t even know we were wolf-shifters. I thought I was human. Had no reason to think otherwise.” He stopped speaking abruptly and pulled his hand away.

“Go on. So you thought you were human.” Summer had thought she was human too. Until Theo Kane arrived at her dorm room with her mother in tow and dragged her up to the island. That’s when she discovered she was really half wolf-shifter and everything she thought she knew about her life was false.

“My father and mother would go off sometimes for a week or two. They would leave us with my crazy grandfather. He would mutter about wolves and spells. It all seemed like make-believe stories.”

Summer felt herself being drawn into Cullen’s story. She could almost see him as a little boy, listening to his grandfather spin tales. “Us?”

“I had three younger sisters. Mary, Eloise, and the baby, Agatha.”

Summer moved so she could look at him more closely. “Did they all grow up, mate, and start aging?”

He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Ah, so you do know something about your wolf heritage. I thought you claimed ignorance on all levels?”

“I picked that up from my Mom before I forbade her to tell me anymore.” The memory slid into Summer’s consciousness. She had been twenty years old and terrified. Her mother had tried to explain to her about her wolf-shifter heritage and she refused to listen to it. Summer had stormed out of the house, dropped out of college, and moved out on her own. She’d never let her mother explain anything else about wolf-shifting or magical spells.

A tear slipped down her cheek. Before she could wipe it, Cullen’s calloused thumb brushed the moisture away.

Her voice shook. “So, yes, I know a wolf-shifter remains eternally thirty years old until they find and mate their soul mate at which point they start to age again. So they either wait eternally for their other half, or they commit ritual suicide to end their lives when they’ve had enough.”

Cullen nodded. “That’s right.”

“Did they?” She wanted to move on, hear his story, not focus on anything to do with her.

Cullen shook his head. “What?”

“Did Mary, Eloise, and Agatha grow up, mate, and give you a ton of great-great-great nieces and nephews running around or are they still waiting?”

“No to both scenarios.” Cullen’s voice lowered two octaves. “When I was ten my father came to me and told me I had to go away from home. That some men would be coming for me. He explained we were magical creatures, that we had been blessed with wolf-halves and it was time for me to join the pack and meet my wolf. It sounded like one of my grandfather’s crazy stories. I didn’t really believe it. But my mother started to get the house ready. It was a big deal that the royal family was coming to collect me personally. It was considered a sign of respect towards my father.”

“So we’re supposed to shift for the first time at ten?” Summer was intrigued. Why had she never let her mother explain any of this to her? All of the reasons seemed so remote now, so completely illegitimate.

“Thirteen, actually. But tradition held that the chosen youth would live with the royal for three years before their first shift. It established a sense of loyalty to the royal family so even if you lived hundreds of miles away you retained a sense of family with your Alpha and his family.”

“And that’s why everyone is still so loyal to Tristan to this day?”

“No. None of the current pack was alive back then. Michael and two of the Alpha guards are over two hundred years old, but things had changed by then. You see, my parents never got to see all their preparations come to fruition.”

Summer took a deep breath. She’d known his parents were killed, he’d said so, but she hadn’t expected his pain to mirror in her chest. His eyes glazed over into their wolf gaze. She reached out and touched the side of his face, desperately wanting his blue depths back. He didn’t blink.

His voice was a mix between man and wolf. “They came that night. Men with hoods over their faces on horseback. They knew what we were. A tall, burly man with red gloves woke me and dragged me outside. My parents were already out there, although I didn’t recognize them. They had shifted. My father was huge, his fur totally black. He fought back, attacked the horses. It was gallant, really. My mother defended the door to the house, or she tried to. By the time I got outside, she was mortally wounded. She was white, like you and your mother. It’s unusual, you know, to be totally white.”

“Why is it unusual?” She’d heard this but she didn’t understand why.

“It’s like having red hair. It’s just genetics. There aren’t that many pure white wolves. Most shifters are several shades of different colors. To be just one, it’s rare.”

She stroked the side of his face, ran her hands through his hair. She never should have made him talk about any of this. She felt his pain, deep inside her, as if it were her own. “Don’t tell me any more, Cullen. You don’t have to.”

“My mother looked up at me and whimpered. Then she died. They had torn her body to shreds with knives. She was missing one of her paws.” A shiver was the only outward sign he cared.

Even after almost three hundred years how did Cullen talk about this at all?

It’s his wolf. That’s why it’s in his eyes. We protect you. I tried to do that today when you saw your father, but you wouldn’t let me. Cullen doesn’t deny his. They just naturally co-exist. This would be too much for him, so his wolf takes some of the pain.

“Two more men came out holding the girls. Eloise and Agatha together. Mary, she was eight, she kicked and fought. But the two little ones just screamed. I tried to get to them, but the red-gloved man shoved a rusty knife into my stomach. Even then I didn’t want them to take my sisters. But I fell to my knees with the pain.”

“Okay, Cullen. You don’t have to relive this. I’m sorry. Please stop.” She wanted to comfort him but didn’t know how.

“My father turned around to see what had happened to me. One of the men on horseback cut off his head. They all kept chanting that we were abominations from god, spawns of the devil. I fell down on the ground. They figured me for dead, so they left me alone. One of the men held Agatha’s head in the bucket of water my mother used for the laundry. She was dead. Mary bit the man holding her. She would have been one feisty wolf. They dropped her and she ran. So with the same machete they had used to kill my father, a man on horseback chased her and took off her head. Eloise got away. She crawled over to me screaming. I could barely move, but I pulled the knife out of my gut.”

Summer could see it, could believe he did that. Ten years old, his blue eyes must have been huge on his face. She would bet he’d been scrawny with broad shoulders. She wasn’t sure why she could see him so clearly. But she was certain she was right.

“I took the knife they’d used on me. I crawled over to the man who’d carried me out. They were busy, laughing. One of them suggested they take Eloise back with them to dissect her after they killed her. I plunged the knife into his stomach. He screamed and went down. The others turned and saw me. Someone struck me with a knife in my side. The pain was so awful I fell down and blacked out. I never saw them kill Eloise.”

He blinked and looked at her for the first time since he’d started speaking. Shocking her, he reached out and cupped her cheek with his hand before he smiled.

How could he smile after what he’d just relived?

“How did you survive?”

“When I woke up, a woman stood over me. She sung a quiet tune and spoke words I didn’t know. I felt soothed and all of my pain was gone. She was our Alpha’s wife Lucinda, and she was a great healer. When they arrived I had been almost dead but she’d brought me back. She couldn’t save anyone else.”

Summer leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, thought she felt him shudder. “How long was it until you were okay?”

“I was never okay again. But I got through it—just as you will. I trained hard for three years with Kendrick and the others my age. We became very close, like brothers. When I finally shifted, Kendrick brought me out one night. There was a man there and even though I’d never seen his face before, I knew him. I could smell him. He was the man with the red gloves who had dragged me out of bed and stabbed me. They had him tied to a tree. Kendrick and his brothers released him. He ran, and I chased. Eventually, I caught him.”

She sat up and stared at him. “So you got vengeance, but you don’t want me to have any. How is that fair?”

“Because I know how that event changed me. It altered who I was even more than the death of my parents did. I don’t want to see that happen to you, Summer. You have the most beautiful soul. I wouldn’t want you to sully it with revenge.”

Summer opened her mouth to answer him when a huge boom filled the room. The cottage they were in started to shake.

Danger. Her wolf screamed for the shift. Cullen wrapped his arms around her rolled the two of them off the bed onto the floor. A moment later the shaking stopped.

Cullen jumped up and ran to the window.

“The Institute’s on fire.” As he ran for the door, he shifted into his wolf. Without thought, Summer followed him and assumed her wolf form as well. Cullen had been right. It was easy to shift after the first time. In fact, she hardly noticed she’d done it. It felt like riding a bike. She just knew what she was doing but she couldn’t get over how well she could hear and how sharp her sense of smell was. The wind was on her back, the grass beneath her feet, and she was a part of all of it.

The Institute was on fire, and Ashlee, Tristan, and the babies were in there. She wouldn’t lose all of her family in one day.